Arguments for God's Existence from Contingency

[Edwardo Piet]

Frozen dog shit on a stick. He doesn't say "Therefore God." He says, "this everyone understands to be God". You quoted it and you still got it wrong.

He doesn't literally say the words "Therefore God" but that's what he is saying, i.e. that is what he is arguing for. Your quibble is irrelevant, I'm well aware that Wikipedia says "This everyone understands to be God" (and if you want to be petty, Aquinas himself didn't literally write those exact English words either).

But no, everyone does not understand that to be God. Many people don't understand that to be God at all and many people understand God to be more than that or something else. In fact, even deists understand God to be more than that. God isn't simply the first cause, God has to at least have an intelligence and be more than simply an uncaused cause, something that Aquinas hasn't argued for.

All Aquinas has done is made an argument for an uncaused cause and labelled that with "God". Hence my point that he has said a bunch of irrelevant stuff that makes sense and concluded "Therefore God." I'm not saying he literally used those exact words. Nor do I need to say that. Jesus.

It's a difference that makes all the difference. Aquinas is saying that any god having the nature of a prime mover perfectly overlaps with the nature of the Christian God given by special revelation.

He's not talking about gods at all, he's not even successfuly arguing for a prime mover with a mind or a diest God, let alone a Christian God. He's merely arguing for an uncaused cause, that's it. Merely by asserting "This uncaused cause is God" is a completely bare assertion because it doesn't have the properties of God or the mind of God and it isn't anything like God, it's just an uncaused cause. Literally the only thing it has in common with God is the uncaused cause aspect. Aqunias is doing the equivalent of arguing for the existence of a person with a mustache and then saying that because Hitler had a mustache then the person with a mustache must be Hitler. There's no reason to think that just because God has X property and Y has X property that Y is necessarily God. Especially when God is supposed to have a lot more than one property, and there's no reason to think that any random person with a mustache is Hitler and there's a lot more about Hitler than the fact he had a mustache.

Otherwise, it is good to see that you agree with the notion of a prime mover. That means you accept that the logic of the demonstration is impeccable. You've debunked nothing.

If all Aquinas is doing is arguing for the existence of an uncaused cause then he has demonstrated no god at all, not even a deist one. He's demontrated an uncaused cause, at best. And he hasn't even necessarily demonstrated that because he hasn't demonstrated that the universe is necessarily finite.

Your examples of tautologies have nothing to do with Aquinas.

My point was that saying stuff that logically makes sense isn't enough when your conclusion is a non-sequitur.

If Aquinas is not saying, "Therefore God", and all he is doing is labelling the concept of an uncaused with the word "God", then he hasn't demonstrated God, or any god, at all.

Demonstrating X and labelling it as Y does not demonstrate Y. Aquinas's method has the same problem as labeling God as "The unknown" in the following explanation of trying to use a definition to prove something and failing:

First, the basics: A definition is simply the act of setting some symbol equal to some concept, so that you have an easy way of referring to that concept. A definition itself can't be correct or incorrect, because the symbol has no inherent meaning of its own.

But you have to be careful when you establish that definition, the SYMBOL = CONCEPT relationship, that you're not implicitly thinking of the symbol as having another, hidden concept inside it already. Because if you are, then what you're doing is actually equating one concept with another, different concept. That's not a definition, that's a claim, and it can be incorrect.

Here's a case study that may ring a bell. Some people are fond of saying that they define “God” to be the unknown, or to be a symbol of perfection, or to be whatever caused our universe to exist. At first glance, this seems puzzlingly pointless. Why assign the word “God” to something like the unknown? We already have a word for the unknown — it’s “the unknown.”
But clearly, this doesn’t feel pointless to them. There is some reason they want to be able to say “God exists” instead of “The unknown exists,” even though those two statements should theoretically mean the exact same thing according to their own definition. And that’s because the symbol “God” still has concepts hidden inside it. They haven’t scrubbed the word entirely clean of its original meaning before redefining it. With both meanings of “God” conflated into one word, they feel like the fact that the word is now pointing to something that exists allows them to believe in the existence of what the word used to be pointing to.

This is exactly the problem Aquinas is having. He hasn't scrubbed the concept of "God" completely when he equates it with an uncaused cause. There's more to the concept of "God" embeded in the word, and he's holding that back implicitly and then pretending the conclusion leads to that, when really all it leads to is an uncaused cause, and all he's done is labelled that with the word "God". Thomas Aquinas is very clearly either saying something completely pointless and merely arguing for an uncaused cause and not for God, or he is committing the equivocation fallacy.

Source: http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.co.uk...thing.html